Berlin, Brussels, Washington, Ottawa – A new website was launched today dedicated to enlarging the public debate on the EU’s controversial policies for investment protections and investor-to-state dispute settlement systems (ISDS) in the EU-US and EU-Canada trade negotiations.

The site (http://eu-secretdeals.info) includes newly leaked investment chapters from the ongoing EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) negotiations, analysis of those chapters, and other information contradicting the Commission’s position that these transatlantic trade agreements must include strong investment protections.

After 50 years of failing to complete the terms and conditions of a U.S. / Canada agreement to compensate for the loss of water from Lakes Michigan-Huron and Georgian Bay due to navigation dredging in the St. Clair River, President Obama’s Administration has started to act. Last Tuesday, the U.S. President approved a modest amount of funding for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to re-evaluate its past compensation designs in light of current knowledge and technologies. The President’s funding will get the process started. The Corps engineering analysis should take up to three years to complete.

March 5TH, 2014. There is a lot going on in Germany right now. Yesterday we reported that a leaked document from inside the Ministry for Environment warns about the potential effects of TTIP on consumer protection and environment legislation. Now, IG Metall, a german trade union with roughly 2,4 million members (making it the largest trade union in the world), has called for an immediate halt to the ongoing negotiations on TTIP.The IG Metall chariman, Detlef Wetzel, considers the agreement to be "dangerous", and fears how it may damage consumer protection and workers rights, as well as undermining democracy and the sovereignity of the state.Considering the growth and jobs promised by the European Commission, Wetzel calls these projections for overly optimistic and disputes that TTIP will have any noticable benefit whatsoever. Wetzel considers the conclusions in the report from

What has become of the Canada-European Union free trade deal? The Harper government announced an “agreement in principle” with the EU in late October. And yet talks continue in a number of areas, notably on a controversial NAFTA-like investment protection chapter that is giving Europeans second thoughts.

Feb 27 (Reuters) - Canada has no plans to further ease rules for foreign investment in uranium mines after Ottawa moved to give European Union firms more leeway, a senior official said on Thursday.

As part of a Canada-European Union free trade deal that was announced in principle last year, Ottawa waived a longstanding requirement that EU buyers take on a Canadian partner in uranium mines.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said Canada did not intend to make the same offer to non-European companies such as Australia's Rio Tinto Ltd, which has uranium deposits in northern Saskatchewan.

"There are no current plans to do that," he told reporters, saying the easing of rules for European firms was a major step.

THE trade agreement the 12 members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) hope to reach is to be “ambitious”, “comprehensive”, “high-standard” and “21st-century”. I know this, because every one of the 12 trade ministers who spoke at a press conference at the end of four days of talks in Singapore on February 25th, used at least one, and usually all four, of the terms. The talks had made great progress, they all also agreed. But “significant gaps” remain, no date or place has been chosen for their next meeting, and it was hard to avoid the conclusion that any agreement is months or years away.

EXCLUSIVE / Plans for a sweeping EU-US free trade deal known as TTIP risk being blown off course by civil society fears about the damage it could wreak on environmental and social protections, according to a leaked EU document seen by EurActiv.

The preparation paper for an EU-US Summit on 26 March, which is marked as ‘restricted’, identifies the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Protocol (TTIP) as a “clear vector for jobs and growth for both the EU and US”.

But it warns that “stakes are high” in the race to thrash out a deal, with “challenges on both sides of the Atlantic that need to be managed.”

You can safely bet that the (TPA) will not feature as much in the forthcoming European elections as the extradition of illegal immigrants or the (alleged) teaching of "gender theory" in French schools. The TPA will affect 800 million affluent people and almost half the world's wealth (1). The European Commission is negotiating this free trade agreement with Washington on behalf of the EU's 28 member states, and the European parliament elected this May will be expected to ratify it. Nothing is settled as yet, but on 11 February the French president François Hollande, during his state visit to Washington, proposed to speed things up, saying: "We have everything to gain by moving quickly. Otherwise, as we know all too well, there will be a build-up of fears, threats and tensions."